Customer Setup of the NCR PC-8. - THE CORE MEMORY

missing a step, and doing exactly what the author intended, no matter how unclear theinst:ruction. People don't behave that way. They skim instructions. They do things out ofordes. They don't understand everything they read. They make mistakes, lots of them.It is therefore essential to shift the burden of explanation to the hardware.2. Based on difficulties in this experiment, there is a clear need to label both thegraphics and seriallparallel boards.3. For the disk drive slides, the name should be added to the body and the tapecovering the instructions removed.4. An extension of the self-documenting principle is to have parts show how they gotogether. For cards, a label (preferably pictorial) should indicate the slots it can go into.Likewise, the system box or the motherboard should be labeled to indicate the cards eachslot will accept.6. To speed installation of the slides, an outline of the slide should appear on theside of the disk drive.6. To facilitate opening the cabinet, labels are needed on the cabinet to indicatewha~; the various screws are for, especially those that need to be removed to get the topoff. Making them a different color or type (for example, combination slotted or Phillips hexhead) would also help but could be more costly.7. Removal would also be facilitated by providing an illustration showing how.There are some tricks to taking the top off that are difficult to capture in words but easilyshown with pictures.8. The positio~~s of the keyboard switch (PC-4iPC-6, PC-8) should be labeled.9. Beyond these specific hardware changes, the design of the color display should bereviewed. While not a setup problem per se, it flickers noticeably when running the initialtutorial (where reverse video is used). The best solution may be to modify the tutorialsoftware rather than the hardware.10. Some thought should be given to enlarging the backspace key, a commonly usedkey. As with the display problem, it is not unique to setup, but nonetheless the smallbackspace key led to many typing errors during setup. This change has been made on thenew IBM RT keyboard, which supposedly will be the standard keyboard for all new IBMproducts. For the PC-8, it may not be a cost-effective change.11. There were numerous problems with the documentation, and the participantsconstantly complained about them. The most important change needed is to consolidate